


Float On

by docboredom



Category: Starlight Brigade - TWRP ft. Dan Avidan (Music Video), TWRP | Tupper Ware Remix Party (Band)
Genre: :GUN:, Family Dynamics, Gen, They/Them Pronouns for Strive (Starlight Brigade), Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, a reflection fic, and learning about yourself, and self worth, and this is about TEENAGE FEELINGS, anyways i love one sixteen year old sassy child, anyways this is um, brian's not here die mad, don't make me write a SLB/YW crossover ill do it, found family is not a tag??? hello?, i got so off track from my original fic idea, it's cos i dont know what i'm DOING, so like i might make a small collection in this verse, strive is a good kid, tag wranglers on ao3 HATE HER, there is VERY minor young wizards allusions in this, this is like my 5th twrp, who knows - Freeform, y'all really made me come up with a whole new twrp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24450811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/docboredom/pseuds/docboredom
Summary: “You can actually start to get to know everybody.” He had said with a laugh then, hands tucked into his pockets, stance relaxed and open. “Maybe teach some of us old geezers a thing or two, kid. Think on it, yeah?”They hadn’t had to think about anything. The answer was obvious. Had been since they had braved that Void ship and met everybody and set a course across the universe to save everyone. “Yes.” They had whispered, the stars blooming above them. “It would be my honor, Captain Sung.”
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	Float On

**Author's Note:**

> heard people don't think kids can save the world  
> i'd like to think so

Another day, another galaxy.

They hadn’t really been keeping track of the passage of time since this mission had started, but Strive’s manual was more than happy to start spewing up facts the moment they opened it. Long enough for Moebius’s moons to cycle themselves anew twice over, enough for the weather to start to change itself, enough for their hair to grow an inch now that they thought of it. Stars… They decided not to linger on it, flipping through the rest of the pages of information on where they were at, eyeing the same old, same old. 

Supervoids ranging from 50 to 100 megaparsecs, manufactured replications of primordial oscillation, blah blah blah space jargon bullshit. “Pretend I’m in preschool.” Strive tapped their fingers along the diagram, snorting when the manual decided to take their words literally and turn itself into a dense picture book. “Oh, ha-ha, very funny.” Strive snorted at the page that now greeted them; angry, glaring black triangles zipping around. 

‘ _ The Void was hungry! It wanted to eat!’ _ was suddenly announced dramatically.  _ ‘It gobbled up all the stars without asking, and people found that quiet mean. Those were their stars! And now they were gone-’ _

“Give me something at my reading level, smart ass.”

The manual clapped it’s pages together and reset itself. Ah, now that was better, they thought as a few diagrams filled the reimagined screen, even going so far as to give him a series of cliffnotes. Basically, it was all dead space, no more than dust and distant echoing.  _ Everything  _ was dead space out here. Sucked dry by the Void and left lingering in it’s absence. They still did not know how far it’s spread went or if there were more hiding. 

Enter the Starlight Brigade.

After their great big showdown against the Hivemind, everyone had assumed that they were done, that they had achieved the penultimate victory. Everyone but the Brigade, that was. Call it post traumatic stress response. Call it being overly cautious. Call it knowing nothing more than dying starlight and giving up everything to fight against it. They would never forget the way Sung approached them in the middle of all the post battle revelry to ask them to join the Brigade officially, helmet knocked back to reveal a startling average man- if not for the third eye centered in the middle of his forehead. It changed colors with every blink like an endless prism of rainbow. “You can actually start to get to know everybody.” He had said with a laugh then, hands tucked into his pockets, stance relaxed and open. “Maybe teach some of us old geezers a thing or two, kid. Think on it, yeah?”

They hadn’t had to think about  _ anything _ . The answer was obvious. Had been since they had braved that Void ship and met everybody and set a course across the universe to save everyone. “Yes.” They had whispered, the stars blooming above them. “It would be my honor, Captain Sung.” 

Brian wasn’t with them anymore. Not in the morbid sense of the phrasing, moreso based on the fact that he had been the one in the Brigade trained in guerilla warfare, and for what they were doing right now that wasn’t quite necessary. “Field work.” Meouch told them when they had been given the mission. “Not everything is boom boom lazer fights, bud.” 

And that was fine, at the time. Something was better than nothing after all. As much as they missed Moebius and their grandfather, being  _ here _ was where Strive had finally started to feel a sense of belonging, something they had been chasing after for sixteen years. Well. Maybe fifteen. Thirteen? Ten...? Baby Strive had not been capable of thinking about such existential dreads, after all, so they’d go with ten. What Sung had said too had also been a part of it. Getting to actually  _ know _ the men whose lives he had virtually blasted right into the middle of. Learning more about them. 

Sung was half-Gaean, half-Tilakan, all energy. The Gaean interfered with the visions his species were normally gifted, but he insisted his dreams were downright astounding, reflective of a second life. He was the Captain of the Starlight Brigade, known as the face, the ace, the  _ star _ . Strive’s manual had told them all about how the golden wonderboy had been the first to successfully take down a Void ship ten years ago after years of struggling to even catch up to them. He had been the same age as Strive was now.

Phobos was the rarest of the group, Heliades royalty sent to war, and when you removed all that armor he wore upon his person you revealed a being of light. Quite literally. More often than not the glow was reserved to his four eyes and the markings all over his form, but he could go supernova if need be, luminous and nuclear, their ultimate weapon against the Void not yet shown. They all liked to tease him about how the sunny disposition translated into the way he lived and he never denied it. He was the Brigade’s medic, cook, shoulder to cry on. Strive still couldn’t believe something like him existed, and yet here he was.

Meouch was of the Machairae, a proud race known by all. His azure coloring a rare mutation that they were still studying to this day despite him being the second oldest of the group- nearly 30 cycles old. He spoke ten different alien tongues fluently and could read decently in five more. And while everyone called him the heart throb, lover boy, hot stuff; he didn’t really live up to the supposed flirtatious assumptions, spending too much time training, reading, and contemplating on possible battle tactics and means of attack in the simulation room. 

And lastly there was Havve, the first of his kind, an Aljazari Automaton. Given that the Void used the very oscillations Strive had been reading about before, they decided to create a thing that could disrupt their frequencies and turn them against themselves. It was thanks to Meouch and Sung that Havve was more than a weapon though. They had helped program an artificial intelligence into his mainframe that could learn and grow. 

The last two months had been a lot because there wasn’t much happening, Brigade wise as it were. So there was hand to hand combat lessons with all four men instead, learning various styles and even how to wield different weapons to start with. Phasers made them uneasy, they had learned, but they liked the heavy crack of a bo-staff against the practice dummy, the lightweight dance of a rapier stabbing in. The Brigade all picked two aspects to go over with them too. Sung was all about the physical upkeep and psychology, Phobos was history and politics, Meouch worked with them on linguistics and sciences like anatomy and chemistry, and Havve finished out with mathematics and technology use. Moebius hadn’t had anything like this when they had been growing up. It was rigorous  _ and _ invigorating. It was a whole new world for them.

Two months though. Was it really? It felt like they had been floating out here for years now, chasing after a ghost with nothing to show for it, empty handed and pathetic...

“Hey, nerd, are you seriously still studying? Class was done forever ago.” Sung was suddenly leaned up against his doorway looking effortlessly casual. “Your head’s gonna explode.”

“Could you imagine?” Strive flicked through another page of their manual, only half reading it, knowing it’d be exactly what it was yesterday, and the day before that. “You hit a word threshold and suddenly  _ KA-BOOM. _ ” They burst their fingers up from their scalp. “Brain matter everywhere. Globs of the stuff.”

“Stars, I don’t remember being this morbid when I was sixteen.” Sung clucked his tongue as he made his way into the room. “You feeling okay?”

Strive sighed. They wanted to talk about it but they also didn’t. Sung was doing that whole furrowed brow ‘I’m worried about you’ look thing he did so well. “...Just checking the date.” They finally huffed, trying not to turn over poutily. “I didn’t realize it had been so long since we launched, y’know. Days blur by, but they don’t when you’re doing ‘nothing.’” They reached behind them and fixed their pillows before stretching their legs out. “I’m just overthinking.” 

‘Trying to find something with meaning’ is what that really meant.

Everything had been so fast paced and terrifying during the first battle, but when they had first started this mission, when things had first started settling, in the quiet of everything, that’s when the worry hit. Worry that they’d be the odd one out. They were just a kid, after all, and these were adults. More than that, these were adults that had known each other for as long as they had been alive! No more than a baby watching the sky. There were bonds between these four men they couldn’t even begin to sort out and really, he was only here because of some miracle accident. But every day had proved that fact wrong the longer they stayed here. They were allies. They were equals. They were warriors  _ bound _ to fight against the eternal night that threatened to fall upon them. Saviors of the stars. Before everything, Strive could have never imagined such trust in someone, in anybody. Now? It was the complete opposite.

But still, they  _ wanted _ something. That sense of purpose again. That rush of adrenaline. 

“They say the best cure to overthinking is mindless television.” Sung poked their bare knee cap. “Junk food is also a miracle worker. I’ll check the stash. We can have a movie night with everyone.”

Strive sat up. The call of junk food was too tempting to resist, even in the throes of self imposed teenage angst and martyrdom. “Are you sure sure Meouch didn’t eat it all?” They shot after a moment, this close to getting up.

Sung squinted all three of his eyes, let his nostrils flare, sighed inaudibly. “...You’re going to make me check, aren’t you?”

“Duh.” Strive laid back down again, flipping the manual above their head, smirking just a tiny little bit. “Call me when it’s been secured, Captain.”

Sung didn’t leave the room quite yet though, instead reaching over to ruffle their hair carefully, surprising them. “I’ve got popcorn and these things from Gaea called M&Ms in my room if anything, but ice cream’s always better for days like these, anyways.” He smiled, faint and soft, before leaving them in the silence of their room.

Another day, another galaxy.

Strive smiled slightly.

Maybe it wasn't that bad, after all.


End file.
